Patrick Church and the Art of Transfer

By Alice Blackhurst

January 09, 2018

"My work is about love."

Patrick Church is a celebrated painter, artist, and now, emerging designer on the underground Manhattan fashion and arts scene. While working part-time as a DJ in 2016 in London, he took a leather jacket and hand-painted it before his night’s setlist, wanting to combine his love of painting and music in the outfit he was wearing. Spotting the arresting combination of delicate, floral paintwork on tough aging leather, a small boutique owner in the audience approached him to paint more jackets, which sold out the day after they appeared for sale.

Having heard about Church via artist friends in London, and curious about the fluid nature of his clothes, I sought him out during a research trip to New York in November. He told me about exciting upcoming collaborations with BLK Denim and cult Manhattan store Opening Ceremony over dumplings and green tea in Chinatown. ‘I never intended to become a designer,’ he stressed, dressed in PVC and lace-up boots, ‘it just happened.’ A spirit of risk, spontaneity, and optimism carries over to his work at large, which spans sculpture, paintings, and the embellishment of already-existing fashion garments such as Vêtements pieces and Hermès Birkin bags. In these austere times, his work insists on color, decadence and the generative force of love, sex, and desire. ‘My work is all about love,’ he explained to me when I asked about the purpose of his art.

Church — whose artistic inspirations include the artist Tracy Emin, the painter François Boucher, and the photography duo Mert and Marcus — has always been on the side of identity as a fluid, mutable performance, rather than a fixed category. He is drawn to larger-than-life characters such as drag and performance artists, and, as he recounted over our meal, “people who don’t take themselves too seriously.” At the same time, he does not obscure or sugarcoat the vulnerability that staging these performances and outsized personalities — including, first and foremost, his own — sometimes exposes.

Photo by Eli Schmidt

In painting florid and baroque motifs on leather, silk, and other historically weighty fabrics and recruiting “beautiful boys” to wear his anatomically amorphous clothes, Church brings the sometimes warring factions of the masculine and the feminine into blurred, liminal contact, making any cut and dry distinction between them feel reductive. If garment artists like Phoebe Philo, Dries Van Noten, and Rei Kawakubo have done much to show that what we think of as femininity can be disassociated from the ornamental, then Church wants to show that the "masculine" can similarly operate independently from mute colors and hard lines. According to Church, “Sensuality should not be reserved for the feminine. I think when opened up to the possibilities of beauty in contrast, we can explore a broader range of emotion. That’s where I want to live.”

Church’s rapid rise in New York City speaks to his work’s creation of a universe in which people from multiple backgrounds and of multiple ethnicities want to reside. In a culture where minorities — particularly trans people and people of color — have been taught to tamp down their expressions of their non-conformity, Church’s vision offers optimism and a spirit of permissiveness: giving admirers the go-ahead to claim the identity that they desire, as opposed to the one they have been told to hold onto, diminish, or hide behind. In his work’s recurring motif of the figure of the cowboy there are echoes of the best — if perhaps most idealistic — chords of the American dream: that you can be anything you want to be and that dreams should be relentlessly pursued. Church, who was born in Britain, admits to being intoxicated by American culture, confessing that, to this day, “the fantasy is very real.” His work’s focus on sex, eating, and orality ensures however, that these more fantastical elements of dream, escape, and identity creation occur within the frame of everyday life and the fleshy body. A future desired project is to road-trip around the country, “painting on motel stationary.”

Photo by Eli Schmidt

An attempt to filter larger ideas through more democratic forms finds expression in his recent turn to clothes. As he emphasizes, “Not everyone is going to understand a $50,000 canvas, but clothing is something everyone can understand.” Legibility and the ability to connect to the autobiography of the artist are important values to Church. If his works have a strong narrative element, this is in recognition of the LGBTQ+ community’s long-time exclusion from mainstream stories and the urgent need to claim the right to tell and re-tell their lives.

Meeting Church, I wondered whether there is tension in electing Gucci, Vêtements, or Hermès pieces as preferred springboards for the generation of these narratives. Conspicuous consumerism — and the items it creates — remains out of reach for the majority of the community from which Church draws inspiration. The artist/muse relationship is always a fraught one. In response to these potential criticisms, Church, keeping with his work’s fresh energy, offered a new perspective. “I recognize that I am creating some sort of fantasy by painting these ‘luxury’ items with my work,” he said. “But in painting over them I am sort of dismissing their value and maybe reestablishing what their value actually is.”

Photo by Eli Schmidt

Ultimately, the main story of value that Church wants to “tell and retell” via his work is the story of meeting his husband, Adriel Herrera. Their subsequent romantic narrative reveals how Church encounters clothes — not as precious or policed commodities, but as personal, customizable artifacts and talismans. The first night he met Herrera, for example, Church gave him his favorite painted leather jacket out of his entire collection. ‘I refused to sell it for years, but in that moment it didn’t belong to me. He wore it to the airport when I came to visit him in New York and a few months later we were married.’

In its earnestness and its enthusiasm, Church’s art replaces tired tropes of endless irony and arch campness with a more positive, inclusive practice. In his new, sideline incarnation as a clothes designer, he is often listed as one of New York’s most exciting inter-medium artists. “I’m making clothes, not saving lives,” he emphasized, as numerous people stopped to admire his outfit in the autumnal streets of the Lower East Side. But clothes are often the medium through which creative-minded people find a space to live; a vital shell to incubate future — more than things to wear, but things to love.